Increases access speeds and reduces boot times. Requires no additional hardware. Works with all operating systems.

Cons

Not as fast as SSDs or other hybrid solutions. Benefits don’t kick in right away.

Bottom Line

With the Momentus XT (750GB) Seagate has improved its line of internal hybrid storage devices by boosting both capacity and performance.

Some things never change: Even in the wake of the recent Thailand flooding that’s caused a major spike in hardware prices, hard drives remain a better deal than solid-state drives (SSDs) when it comes to capacity, and SSDs still stomp them in terms of speed. Seagate made a major attempt to achieve the best of both worlds a year and a half ago when it released its Momentus XT hybrid drive, which fused a spinning drive’s space with SSD’s near-instantaneous flash memory. Now Seagate is revisiting the concept with a new Momentus XT ($245 list) that’s bigger (750GB as opposed to 500GB) and supposedly even faster. Market shifts in the last year have made it less necessary for some users, but it remains an outstanding way to accelerate your system with a minimum of effort.

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Design and FeaturesIn most ways, the Momentus XT remains a fairly standard drive. Its 2.5-inch form factor makes it ideal for laptops (and its 9.5mm height helps it in that areas as well), though of course there’s no reason it can’t be used in desktops as well. The hard drive portion spins at 7,200rpm (good for laptops), and there’s 32MB of DRAM cache on board as well. From there, things get considerably more interesting.

The concept behind the Momentus XT is a simple one: use its included flash memory to cache frequently accessed data so the hard drive’s deficiencies are diminished as much as possible. (Because this happens at the hardware level, the drive can work its magic with any OS.) Seagate has tweaked both areas in its 750GB rethink. The company has upped the original cache of 4GB SLC NAND flash to 8GB, so there’s more room to play with at the outset. In addition, Seagate has implemented new “adaptive memory” algorithms that better help the drive learn what you do and what programs and files you use most, so it best knows what it should cache in the flash memory; this reduces the amount of time you have to wait for those speed increases to kick in. The down side to this is that data not in the cache is still manipulated by the slower hard drive, but you still get some tangible benefits.

Seagate has also expanded the Momentus XT’s capabilities in two key ways. First, it has devoted a part of the flash memory to a feature called “Fast Boot,” which—you guessed it—caches data exclusively for use during the boot process. Second, there is also now support for the 6Gbps SATA III standard; as more computers and motherboards support this now than did in early 2010, this was a smart move that eliminated one potential performance bottleneck.

PerformanceMuch of Seagate’s work seems to have been worth the trouble. The new Momentus XT outperformed the first one across the board, in both standalone and repeated tests. We measured a burst speed of 346.7MBps for it in HD Tach, for example, as compared with the 500GB’s 191.5MBps; and average read times rose from 88.8 to 95.8 in the same test. In our base PCMark 7 storage test, the 750GB Momentus XT earned a score of 2,992 to the 500GB’s 2,656; after running the test five times, the 750GB’s score had risen to 3,477, whereas the 500GB’s never hit higher than 3,041. (Just for fun, we ran our tests on a non-XT 750GB Momentus drive, and its storage score was a relatively paltry 1,761.)

Boot times were also noticeably improved. Our test system needed 57 seconds to boot with the 500GB drive the first go-around, but the 750GB one came out of the gate at 26.8 seconds. To be fair, after eight more boots the 500GB drive had distilled to 24.3 seconds—but the 750GB had dropped during that same period to 20.6. In other words: The first-generation Momentus XT started off weak and got better; the new one started off-strong and only got stronger. Clearly Seagate has lived up to its promises with regards to refining the underlying Momentus XT technologies.

But in the time since the 500GB Momentus XT came out, there have been some important developments in the storage world. Earlier this year Intel released its Z68 Express chipset with Rapid Storage Technology (RST), which can set up caching with an SSD if the two drives are connected via RAID. When we combined the powers of a 10,000rpm spinning Western Digital VelociRaptor hard drive (using only 3Gbps SATA, no less) with the Intel drive designed specifically for use with RST, the 20GB Intel SSD 311 Series, against the 750GB Momentus XT, the Intel pairing routinely came out ahead.

It could burst 904.6MBps in HD Tach, averaged read times of 103.7 in HD Tune Pro (the Momentus managed only 91.7), and trounced the Momentus XT in our 4KB Crystal Disk Mark tests (read results of 21.94MBps and 45.33MBps in read and write respectively, compared with Seagate’s 0.628 and 1.175)—and its 32-queue-depth scores were even higher, some 100 times what we got from the Momentus XT. In PCMark 7, the Intel-based duo started off at a storage score of 4,465 and stayed there across multiple runs—even after five rounds, the Momentus XT never got that high. And although the drive-SSD combo booted in 36.4 seconds at first, eight more boots got that time down to 19.2 seconds, more than a second quicker than the Momentus XT.

All of this should not be construed as a condemnation of the Momentus XT, however. Intel’s method has two crucial caveats: Your desktop must use a motherboard based on the high-end Sandy Bridge Z68 Express chipset, and its drives must be configured to run in RAID mode (you’ll either need to reinstall the OS or do some potentially dangerous Registry tweaking if they’re not). If your system doesn’t already meet these requirements but you still desire notched-up performance, you’ll almost certainly want a more elegant way.

The Seagate Momentus XT definitely provides that, with an attractive blend of capacity and performance that’s difficult to find elsewhere, especially if a laptop is the drive’s chosen destination. Desktop users have more space and thus more options; a small SSD for programs and a larger spinning hard drive for storage will result in all-around better speeds and not cost you that much more. (And don’t kid yourself that an SSD isn’t much faster—against our Editors’ Choice 128GB Samsung SSD 830 Series, even the VelociRaptor-Intel combo was left cowering straight down the line.) There may be more and better options out there now than there were 19 months ago, but for a one-stop storage speed-up solution, the new Momentus XT is, as was its predecessor, a compelling choice.

About the Author

Matthew Murray got his humble start leading a technology-sensitive life in elementary school, where he struggled to satisfy his ravenous hunger for computers, computer games, and writing book reports in Integer BASIC. He earned his B.A. in Dramatic Writing at Western Washington University, where he also minored in Web design and German. He has been... See Full Bio

Seagate Momentus XT (750GB)

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